Tag: techniques

Shooting in overcast conditions

By John Watson
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One thing you can count on during the Spring and Summer months in southern California is the marine layer: a cool, foggy layer of air blown ashore each evening that doesn’t burn off until around noon. Every morning starts out cool and overcast. Overcast conditions aren’t typically what photographers talk about when they discuss beautiful light. The “golden hour” (dawn and dusk) is only golden if you can see the sun. But overcast conditions have their advantages as well and you can still take great photographs under a gray sky as long as you choose your subjects carefully.

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Capturing motion with panning

By John Watson
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Photographs have always fascinated people with their ability to capture a fleeting moment, to freeze it and preserve it, in a very tangible way, forever. It’s an extremely powerful form of expression. But, through the use of creative exposures, a photograph can do much more than document the world and people around us. Photographs can record emotions, feelings, movement and pass those on to anyone who views them. One way of doing this is through the use of a technique called “panning.”

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Zooming with your feet vs zooming with your lens

By John Watson
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Conventional wisdom says that prime (non-zoom) lenses are the highest quality lenses money can buy. But that wisdom is being challenged by high quality zoom lenses that match or even rival the sharpness and contrast of the best primes. Make no mistake, the best zoom lenses aren’t cheap or small. But the convenience afforded by a zoom lens, even an inexpensive one, to crop with a twist of the wrist or the touch of a button is hard to resist.

The ubiquity of the zoom on compact cameras and as part of SLR kits may have led some to believe that zooming in on a subject is the same as getting physically closer. But there is a big difference between zooming with your lens and “zooming” with your feet.

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How do you get good portrait lighting indoors?

By John Watson
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Lighting is obviously an essential element of photography. Making photos, after all, is about catching those stray photons that bounce off of the world in a creative way.

Getting good lighting can be tough in any situation but indoor lighting can be especially tricky. Normal indoor light levels are fine for eyeballs but are usually pretty low for a camera. So what’s an indoor shutterbug to do?

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A simple technique for creating eye-catching silhouettes

By John Watson
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The silhouette is an old art form, said to have been named after �tienne de Silhouette, Louis XV’s finance minister. Apparently, he was so stingy that anything cheap, including portraits, were labelled “a la Silhouette.” Silhouettes became very popular in the 18th century but went out of fashion after the invention of the daguerreotype, an early form of photography. And now here we are, creating silhouettes with our digital cameras. Ain’t life grand?

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How to Capture Action Reliably and with Style

By John Watson
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If you’re anything like me, you’ll be spending holidays with family and friends, eating, laughing, and, of course, making lots and lots of photographs. At our annual holiday gatherings there are an abundance of children.

children playing on grass

And children make great subjects for photography except for one problem: they don’t sit still. A moving target is one of the most difficult things to photograph. Read on for some tips that should help make things a little easier.

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Creating trails of light with a long exposure

By John Watson
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Have you ever seen photographs of vehicle lights on the freeway or abstract images of beams of light? They’re both examples of what is called a “long exposure.” That is, a photograph with a slow (long) shutter speed. You just need two things to make these kinds of photographs:

  • a camera that allows you to manually set the shutter speed (called “Shutter Priority” mode, it is sometimes noted on cameras with the symbol “Tv”) and that allows shutter speeds longer than 1 second.
  • a stable platform to hold the camera steady

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Using fill flash to enhance natural lighting

By John Watson
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Many people avoid flash photography because of the unnatural and unflattering look it can create. The problem comes from several factors which I’ll talk about in more detail in future articles. For now, I want to talk about a way to use your flash that can not only enhance the natural beauty of a scene, but no one will even be able to tell that a flash was used.

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